School of Radical Imagination Podcast

What if feedback wasn't simply a tool for improvement, but an opportunity to transform how we relate to one another?

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Sam Passeport, founder of No Borders Learning, about reimagining feedback as a practice of dialogue, connection, and liberation.

We often think of feedback as something neutral: one person offers guidance, and another receives it. But Sam challenges us to look more closely at the power dynamics, emotions, identities, and lived experiences that shape every feedback encounter.

Together, we explore what happens when we move away from performance and control toward curiosity, mutual learning, and relationship. The conversation also opens up bigger questions about education: What does it mean to create genuinely liberatory classrooms? Can institutions ever be neutral? And how might we help young people reclaim their capacity to dream?

Sam shares how her own experiences as a student and educator shaped her work, why our bodies hold important knowledge, and how small changes in the way we teach and relate to one another can create ripple effects far beyond the classroom.

In This Episode

• 03:23 — The hidden power dynamics of feedback and how it can reinforce judgment and compliance.
• 05:29 — Embodied knowledge, Ubuntu, and the relationship between feedback and liberation.
• 11:37 — Inside Sam's four-week course, Engaging in Feedback Dialogues for Liberation.
• 15:33 — What Sam learned from her first cohort at the School of Radical Imagination.
• 18:40 — Bringing radical imagination into primary and secondary education.
• 22:07 — The myth of neutrality in education and the importance of critical consciousness.
• 24:39 — How individual contributions can create collective ripple effects.

Feedback is never neutral. Every feedback encounter is shaped by relationships, context, power, and identity. Recognizing these dynamics allows us to approach feedback more intentionally.

Our bodies are sources of knowledge. The emotions and physical responses we experience when giving or receiving feedback deserve attention alongside intellectual understanding.

Dialogue is a practice, not a declaration. Creating an environment where people can genuinely participate requires ongoing attention to power, trust, and relationships.

Resources & References

• Paulo Freire — Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Dialogue, critical consciousness, and liberatory education.
• bell hooks — Teaching to Transgress: Education as a practice of freedom and the importance of engaged pedagogy.
• Dr. Nadira Omarjee: author of We Belong To The Earth: Towards a Decolonial Feminist Pedagogy Rooted in Uhuru and Ubuntu

Dr. Sam Passeport teaches Engaging in Feedback Dialogues for Liberation at the School of Radical Imagination. Through four interconnected themes—body, dialogue, power, and reimagination—the course invites educators to question inherited approaches to feedback and develop practices rooted in relationships, critical consciousness, and liberation.

Explore our courses: https://www.radicalimagination.school

Keep learning, keep imagining, and keep building the world you want to live in.

What if creativity is one of our most powerful tools for confronting climate collapse?

In this conversation, writer, activist, educator, and Harvard PhD candidate Karina Anastasia Mathew explores what art and literature can offer us in a moment increasingly defined by climate crisis, political uncertainty, and dystopian visions of the future.

Karina shares her own journey from writing utopian science fiction as a teenager to studying literature, climate, and speculative fiction—and ultimately realizing that scholarship, activism, and creative practice were never separate pursuits.

Together, we explore what it means to cultivate “fierce hope,” why dystopia isn't the only way to write about crisis, how our relationship to the past shapes what futures we can imagine, and why creativity can help us reclaim a sense of political agency.

In This Episode

01:57 Why Karina created Creative Responses to Climate Collapse

03:04 Bringing scholarship, creativity, and activism together

04:01 Moving beyond the traditional climate literature course

06:28 Writing utopian worlds as a teenager

08:12 Climate crisis, spiritual crisis, and asking what it means to be human

10:04 The eight-week course journey

12:46 Can we write about crisis without dystopia?

13:46 Cultivating “fierce hope”

14:13 Afrofuturism, solarpunk, and imagining otherwise

15:19 The creative challenge of representing climate collapse

18:03 “Informed meaning making”: bringing scholarship and creativity together

21:25 Art, agency, and imagining life-affirming futures

31:16 Bringing our whole selves into learning

Key Takeaways

Creativity can unlock political agency. Karina designed her course not simply to teach climate literature, but to help learners access their own creative power in response to this moment.

We don't have to surrender the future to dystopia. Climate collapse is real, but imagining the future exclusively through catastrophe can reinforce helplessness. Other traditions—from Afrofuturism to solarpunk—give us different possibilities to think with.

Hope doesn't have to mean optimism. Karina calls it “fierce hope”: making room for the reality of crisis while maintaining faith in our ability to participate in what comes next.

Education can help us practice another way of being. Karina imagines a movement of educational rebellion: spaces where learning isn't simply about producing or consuming information, but using knowledge with purpose to create more life-affirming worlds.

Go Deeper

Karina is teaching Creative Responses to Climate Collapse: Worldmaking with Art & Literature, an eight-week live course at the School of Radical Imagination beginning October 7.

Learners will explore scholarship, literature, and art while developing a creative project of their own—using imagination not as an escape from crisis, but as a way of responding to it.

Explore the course + download the syllabus → [COURSE LINK]

If this conversation shifted your perspective, taught you something new, or helped you imagine what else is possible, subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with one person who would appreciate it.

Until next time, keep learning, keep imagining, and keep building the world you want to live in.

What if nonprofit reporting is less about accountability—and more about the performance?

In this conversation, monitoring and evaluation specialist Sonja Wiencke takes us inside the world of nonprofit accountability—where organizations spend enormous amounts of time producing reports, indicators, frameworks, and compliance documents to prove their impact, while the people closest to the work can become little more than research subjects.

Drawing on nearly a decade working across international NGOs, funders, and grassroots organizations, Sonja asks us to move beyond simply recognizing the power dynamics embedded in the sector: If we know they're there, what are we going to do about them?

We explore what theater and storytelling can teach us about power, why so much accountability becomes performative, what happens when communities become “extras without speaking roles,” and how we might redesign the everyday tools of the sector to actually support learning, power-sharing, and change.

In This Episode

02:57 Sonja's journey from aspiring diplomat to international development

07:45 What monitoring and evaluation actually is

08:24 The expectation to “solve poverty with a six-month grant”

11:26 What Palestine and Dominica reveal about aid and grassroots work

13:01 Why don't we just ask communities what's working?

14:16 Why the aid sector keeps producing documents instead of changing relationships

17:16 What theater can teach us about accountability

19:56 Who gets to be the hero in the story of international aid?

21:16 Redesigning reports, budgets, and compliance mechanisms

26:55 Trust, emergence, and organizational design

30:59 What learners will leave the six-week course with

Key Takeaways

Power dynamics are the starting point, not the conclusion. Understanding why inequities exist should open the door to experimenting with what we can do differently.

Trust isn't created through paperwork. More templates, contracts, and compliance procedures cannot substitute for the relational work required to build trust.

Change can happen in the cracks. We may not have the power to transform an entire system, but we can identify where we have influence and begin experimenting there.

Go Deeper

Sonja is teaching Rewriting the Script for Accountability in Nonprofits and Philanthropy, a six-week live course at the School of Radical Imagination beginning October 13.

Learners will use dramaturgy, power mapping, storytelling, and collaborative experimentation to examine the hidden scripts shaping accountability—and redesign a real reporting or compliance tool from their own work.

Explore the course + download the syllabus → [COURSE LINK]

If this conversation shifted your perspective, taught you something new, or helped you imagine what else is possible, subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with one person who would appreciate it.

Until next time, keep learning, keep imagining, and keep building the world you want to live in.

What if freedom isn't something we have to achieve—but something we can practice?

In this conversation, social justice and embodiment facilitator Shawna Wakefield invites us to rethink what freedom feels like—not just intellectually or politically, but in our bodies, relationships, communities, and everyday choices.

Drawing on nearly 30 years of work across movement building, international development, philanthropy, community organizing, and education, Shawna shares what she has learned about the relationship between inner transformation and systems change. We explore why humility and courage need each other, how our smallest ways of relating can reproduce—or disrupt—the systems we're trying to change, and what becomes possible when we orient ourselves toward what we're for, rather than only what we're fighting against.

We also go inside Shawna's Fall course, The Undergrowth Sanctuary: Practicing Freedom as Strategy, an eight-week embodied journey through freedom, belonging, power, grief, imagination, strategy, celebration, and collective liberation.

Resources & Links

📚 Learn more about The Undergrowth Sanctuary: Practicing Freedom as Strategy https://www.radicalimagination.school/courses/the-undergrowth-sanctuary-practicing-freedom-as-strategy

In This Episode

03:43 What 30 years of social justice work has taught Shawna

06:20 Practicing humility alongside courage

08:55 What safety, dignity, belonging, and freedom feel like

09:28 Inside The Undergrowth Sanctuary: Practicing Freedom as Strategy

11:38 Creating a strategic compass for collective liberation

14:31 Teaching at Columbia, Palestine, and choosing to leave an institution

17:16 Anxiety, belonging, and our conditioned responses

21:21 The eight-week journey: freedom, belonging, power, grief, and imagination

24:32 Imagining a North Star and a thriving horizon

32:15 Shawna's radical imagination for the School

Key Takeaways

Freedom can be a practice, not only a destination. We can resist oppressive systems while also asking where we can remember and embody the freedom that is already ours.

Humility and courage belong together. Recognizing that we're all shaped by the systems we're trying to transform doesn't require us to become passive. It can allow us to act with greater courage and less righteousness.

Our bodies hold knowledge our intellects can't always access. Embodied practices can surface insights, desires, grief, and boundaries that might take much longer to reach through intellectual analysis alone.

Grief belongs in the work of liberation. If we don't create ways to grieve collectively, we risk suppressing what we're carrying and trying to simply move on.

We don't always need to convince. There is another way of working together rooted in connection, co-inspiration, imagination, and creating the conditions for new possibilities to emerge.

Connect

Enrollment is now open for The Undergrowth Sanctuary: Practicing Freedom as Strategy, beginning October 15 at the School of Radical Imagination.

Over eight weeks, Shawna will guide learners through embodied practices, storytelling, reflection, and strategic imagination to develop their own compass for practicing freedom in their lives, work, organizations, and communities.

What if we stopped asking what's broken—and started asking what's possible?

In this conversation, educator, entrepreneur, and game designer Keaton Wadzinski explores dreaming as a serious practice for building a different world.

After a decade working with innovation methodologies like design thinking and lean startup, Keaton began questioning their underlying premise: that the world is a collection of problems waiting to be solved. What if, instead of beginning with problems, we began with possibilities?

Together, we explore Keaton's shift from problem solving to possibility finding, his Buildable Dreams framework, what collaborative storytelling games can teach us about imagining together, and why making time to dream may be one of the most responsible things we can do in moments of uncertainty.

We also go inside his course, Giving Yourself Permission to Dream: Building Hope in Dystopian Times, and dream together about what the School of Radical Imagination—and education itself—could become.

Resources & Links

🎓 Learn more about Giving Yourself Permission to Dream: Building Hope in Dystopian Times

https://www.radicalimagination.school/courses/giving-yourself-permission-to-dream-building-hope-in-dystopian-times

📚 Explore Fall courses at the School of Radical Imagination https://www.radicalimagination.school/catalog

In This Episode

04:25 Questioning the assumptions behind design thinking and creative problem solving

06:10 The Buildable Dreams framework: past, present, and future

08:15 What collaborative storytelling games can teach us about building worlds together

10:36 Hope, strength, and endurance as practices for dreaming

11:18 The transformation Keaton wants learners to experience

14:56 The School of Radical Imagination as an emergent learning community

21:46 What happens if we bring this model to younger learners?

22:24 Moving education beyond academics toward human flourishing

Key Takeaways

Dreaming isn't indulgent. Especially in moments of uncertainty, intentionally making space to imagine hopeful possibilities can be an act of responsibility and resistance.

Dreams don't belong exclusively to the future. Keaton's Buildable Dreams framework asks us to see the past, present, and future together—grounding our dreams in lived experience while identifying what we can begin building now.

Imagination can be collaborative. Tabletop role-playing and collaborative storytelling offer a model where no single person owns the story. New worlds emerge through participation, agency, and collective creativity.

Connect

Follow the School of Radical Imagination for conversations with scholars, artists, educators, and practitioners exploring what it takes to question the systems we've inherited and imagine what else is possible.

Enrollment is now open for Giving Yourself Permission to Dream: Building Hope in Dystopian Times, beginning October 21.

If this conversation shifted your perspective, subscribe to the podcast, leave us a review, and share this episode with one person who could use a little more permission to dream.

Until next time, keep learning, keep imagining, and keep building the world you want to live in.

This conversation originally aired on Progress Reimagined, hosted by Kathleen Chu. We're resharing it here with permission.

What if more information isn't what we need to transform our lives?

We live in a time when almost any answer is available within seconds. We can read the book, watch the YouTube video, listen to the podcast, or ask AI—and still find ourselves stuck.

So what actually helps us transform?

This week's episode is a little different. Besan Abu-Joudeh, founder of the School of Radical Imagination, joins Kathleen Chu on Progress Reimagined to share the story behind the School—and the personal unraveling that led her to imagine a different kind of education.

They explore why learning alongside other people can unlock something information alone cannot, why imagination is far from "fluffy," what most of us get wrong about making an impact, and why the traditional idea that we go to school for four years and then spend the rest of our lives working may soon feel outdated.

At its heart, this is a conversation about what education could become when the goal isn't simply acquiring more knowledge—but becoming someone different because of what we've learned.

In This Episode

03:02 — The experience that planted the seed for the School of Radical Imagination

04:18 — A six-month pause and reorienting toward love and life

09:35 — Why the School chose live, cohort-based learning

12:07 — Why faculty have autonomy over what they teach

16:31 — What we get wrong about making an impact

21:00 — Building something with a 10-year vision

21:48 — A future beyond the traditional four-year model of higher education

27:47 — Why imagination isn't "fluffy"

29:54 — Why unlimited access to information can still leave us feeling stuck

30:34 — The difference between information and transformation

33:23 — Creating a learning space where science and spirituality can coexist

Key Takeaways

Learning is relational. Transformation often happens through conversation—with a teacher, a peer, or another person who says something that unlocks a room in our minds we haven't entered before.

Imagination isn't fluffy. CEOs, world leaders, academics, and other people with significant power intentionally create spaciousness to step away from the day-to-day, think about where the world is going, and imagine what comes next. Everyone deserves access to spaces that cultivate that capacity.

No one has all the answers. The School is intentionally built around co-learning. Faculty bring deep expertise, but they enter the classroom with questions too. The teacher is also a learner, and the learner is also a teacher.

About Progress Reimagined

This conversation originally appeared on Progress Reimagined, hosted by Kathleen Chu—a podcast exploring innovative ideas, technologies, and emerging economic models that put humanity and our planet first.

Connect with Kathleen Chu and Progress Reimagined here.

The School of Radical Imagination brings together scholars, artists, practitioners, and lifelong learners to question the systems we've inherited and imagine what else is possible.

Explore our upcoming courses at radicalimagination.school.

How do we design the invisible structures that shape our communities?

In this conversation, architect, creative leader, and systems thinker Hadil El-Baba explores what architecture can teach us about building communities that foster belonging, connection, and meaningful participation.

Hadil shares why she walked away from a successful architecture career in Toronto to follow a deeper question: How do we create the conditions for a different world? Together, we explore the invisible architecture underneath every community—from power and authority to governance, relationships, and belonging—and why changing our larger systems may begin by noticing how these dynamics show up in our own lives.

We also go inside Hadil’s course, The Architecture of Community, an eight-week experiment in consciously designing the communities, organizations, and projects we want to inhabit.

Resources & Links

🎓 Learn more about The Architecture of Community

https://www.radicalimagination.school/courses/the-architecture-of-community

📚 Explore upcoming courses at the School of Radical Imagination https://www.radicalimagination.school/courses

In This Episode

04:39 Returning to Lebanon and learning about belonging, land, resistance, and love

05:51 Reaching the top of the ladder—and deciding you no longer want to play the game

08:44 What architecture teaches us about systems change

10:28 Collaboration, relationships, and learning to zoom in and zoom out

11:44 Why we need to rethink what we mean by “community”

14:41 Inside The Architecture of Community

16:24 What becomes possible when we consciously design the invisible?

17:27 Why Hadil chose to teach at the School of Radical Imagination

Key Takeaways

• Communities aren't simply formed by bringing people together. They are shaped by often-invisible structures around power, authority, governance, participation, and belonging.
• We can ask not only whether we belong somewhere, but how we can belong without losing ourselves or conforming.
• Architecture offers a useful lens for systems change: zoom out to understand the whole while knowing when to zoom in on the relationships and structures underneath it.
• The relational dynamics inside an organization eventually show up in what that organization creates in the world.

Connect

Follow the School of Radical Imagination for conversations with scholars, artists, educators, and practitioners exploring the ideas and practices we need to imagine—and build—a different world.

If this conversation shifted your perspective, taught you something new, or helped you imagine what else is possible, subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, and share this episode with one person who would appreciate it.

Until next time, keep learning, keep imagining, and keep building the world you want to live in.

What if we still have the power to shape AI?

In this conversation, leadership coach, AI strategist, and technologist Oumaima Taloua explores how we can engage with AI without getting swept up in either the hype or the fear. Drawing on more than a decade working in technology and AI, Oumaima shares why understanding these tools matters, how our choices can still shape what gets built, and why the human side of technological change may be more important than the technology itself.

We also go inside her course, You're Not Behind, You're Discerning: AI Literacy for Thoughtful Professionals, and explore what happened when a group of curious, critical thinkers came together to learn about AI—not to be told what to think, but to discern for themselves.

Resources & Links

🎓 Learn more about You're Not Behind, You're Discerning: AI Literacy for Thoughtful Professionals https://www.radicalimagination.school/courses/you-re-not-behind-you-re-discerning-ai-literacy-for-thoughtful-professionals

In This Episode

02:31 A decade in AI—and bringing perspectives beyond Silicon Valley into the conversation

05:31 The geopolitics of AI and how geography shapes access to technological opportunity

08:14 Why Oumaima moved from engineering and product into coaching and education

12:08 Moving beyond "AI is amazing" vs. "AI is dangerous"

17:57 Inside You're Not Behind, You're Discerning

23:11 Why learning at the School is a conversation—not a transfer of information

24:19 Emotional stability, discernment, and navigating rapid technological change

Key Takeaways

• AI literacy isn't about learning every new tool. It's about understanding enough to make informed choices about where—and whether—AI belongs in your life and work.
• We don't have to choose between uncritical adoption and complete rejection. We can hold both the opportunities and critiques of AI at the same time.
• AI is still being shaped. The more people understand these technologies and participate in the conversation, the more influence we can have over what gets built.
• The pace of AI can create overwhelm, but we don't have to keep up with everything. Discernment means deciding what deserves our attention.
• In a moment of rapid technological change, creating space to feel, talk, think, and discern may be just as important as acquiring information.

Connect

Follow the School of Radical Imagination for conversations with scholars, artists, technologists, educators, and practitioners exploring the knowledge we need to navigate this moment—and build what comes next.

If this conversation shifted your perspective, taught you something new, or helped you imagine what else is possible, subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, and share this episode with one person who would appreciate it.

Until next time, keep learning, keep imagining, and keep building the world you want to live in.

Can We Change Systems Without Changing Ourselves?

In this conversation, author and global learning leader Radha Ruparell explores the relationship between inner transformation and systems change. We talk about slowing down in times of urgency, staying in relationship across difference, tending to our individual and collective energy, and why hope itself can be a radical act. Drawing from her work with leaders and educators around the world, Radha reminds us that changing systems isn't only about what we do—it's also about who we are while doing it.

🎓 Explore upcoming courses at the School of Radical Imagination https://www.radicalimagination.school/courses

In This Episode

02:43 Living across worlds and discovering our shared humanity

04:52 "The times are urgent, so let us slow down"

08:11 Perfection, play, and the "six by one" practice

11:27 How our energy affects the systems around us

15:30 Multiple truths, righteousness, and keeping our hearts open

18:18 Moving from fighting against to standing for something

22:28 Reweaving relationships as a way to rewire the world

25:20 How to sustain inspiration after the "mountaintop moment"

29:44 Creating cultures where people have permission to disrupt

Key Takeaways

• Slowing down doesn't have to compete with urgency. Grounding ourselves can change the quality of the action we take.
• Systems change isn't only about what we do. How we show up—our energy, presence, relationships, and ways of being—can shift the systems around us.
• Difference and tension aren't inherently bad. Our capacity to stay in relationship through rupture and repair can open new possibilities.
• Instead of only fighting against what we oppose, we can ask what we are choosing to stand for.
• Hope isn't the absence of darkness. It can emerge from our darkest moments and become a courageous practice of looking for what is working and building from there.

Connect

Follow the School of Radical Imagination for conversations with scholars, artists, educators, and practitioners exploring the ideas and practices we need to build more just and liberated futures.

If this conversation resonated, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with one person who might need a little more hope today.

What if feminism wasn't about gender—but about the future?

In this conversation, feminist systems change practitioner and futures researcher kirthi jayakumar invites us to reimagine foreign policy through a decolonial feminist lens. Together, we explore hope as a discipline, why feminism is fundamentally future-facing, how education can move beyond information toward transformation, and what becomes possible when we see ourselves as active participants in shaping the world rather than passive observers of it.

Resources & Links

🎓 Learn more about Decolonial Feminist Approaches to Foreign Policy

https://www.radicalimagination.school/courses

In this Episode

01:52 The audacity to hope—and why hope became kirthi's life's work

04:31 What feminism really means through a decolonial lens

07:26 Why foreign policy belongs to all of us

14:30 Reimagining education as transformation instead of information

18:33 Critical thinking, stories, and what traditional education misses

23:20 Why we need spaces to think together, not just consume information

24:47 What learners experience in Decolonial Feminist Approaches to Foreign Policy

27:53 Why Kirti chose to teach at the School of Radical Imagination

Key Takeaways

• Hope isn't passive optimism—it's a practice that helps us imagine and build different futures.
• Feminism is a future-facing project that asks us to interrogate systems of power and cultivate hope through action.
• Foreign policy isn't only negotiated by governments; it's shaped every day through the relationships, conversations, and communities we build.
• Education should transform how we see ourselves and the world—not simply increase the amount of information we retain.
• Stories help us notice the perspectives that dominant narratives leave out and invite us into deeper accountability.
• Meaningful learning happens when we reflect together, question inherited assumptions, and practice imagining new possibilities.

Connect

Follow the School of Radical Imagination for weekly conversations exploring education, liberation, technology, creativity, systems change, healing, and the futures we're being called to build.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who is imagining—and building—a better world.